News yesterday that former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez reportedly had committed suicide sent the murderer’s name to the top of Twitter’s “trending” list. Clicking on it brought back a string of tweets that was positively littered with graphic pornography.
How much porn? I reported and blocked at least a half-dozen tweets and my rough estimate would be that about 1 in 50 were obscene (the flow has since receded to a trickle). I have been a daily, heavy user of Twitter since 2008 and this is by no means the first time I have encountered porn there. And, yes, it has previously been noticeable in instances where fast-breaking news makes the trending list. However, today’s deluge was by far the most concentrated and, well, offensive.
(I’m not a prude or anti-porn, I just don’t want to see it on a social media platform I use for work … and that my teenage kids use, too.)
At the time Hernandez was trending, so, too, was the actress Julia Roberts. I clicked on her name and the returned results were with a single exception porn-free. Make of that what you will.
At its height, the Hernandez-tagged porn was troubling enough that I felt compelled to give my followers a heads-up.
I was not the only one who noticed today’s porn barrage.
And a search of Twitter on “trending porn” shows what I already knew, that this been a problem for some time.
It’s getting worse – at least according to my eyes — and Twitter needs to do more to fix it.